The Swarm Constellation Will Look Inside the Earth

Roland Piquepaille writes "Among six Earth Explorer candidate missions, the European Space Agency (ESA) has chosen a 'Swarm' of satellites to look inside the Earth and to do the best survey ever of the Earth's geomagnetic field. The mission, scheduled for launch in 2009, will consist of three satellites released by a single rocket. Two will fly side-by-side 450 km above us while the third one will cruise at an altitude of 530 km. In "ESA to probe Earth's magnetic field," the Register also looks at this future mission which will lead to a better analysis of the Sun's influence in our solar system. More details and illustrations are available in this overview."

Comments

If for no other reason

[Discoflamingo13]

it would be nice to see a system with the ability to update a magnetic variation map of the world faster than NOAA (which happens about every 5 years). Most avionics navigation systems are dependent on these maps for accurate magnetic heading information, and few companies have the resources to make updates between NOAA passes. Depending on its accuracy, it could pay for itself very quickly, if it could make such maps.

Re:If for no other reason

[bravehamster]

magnetic heading will always be there to fall back on.

Not always, no. We're overdue for a flip in the magnetic poles. The flip itself won't happen instantaneously, and during that period there will be a lot of weird currents and local poles that would shift constantly. Magnetic heading would change drastically, possibly from day to day.

Re:If for no other reason

[Elendur]

The field just about goes away. There was a Slashdot article on this at some point in the last few weeks, search for it. It was pretty interesting.